The European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as executive body for the Organisation while the Administrative Council acts as its supervisory body as well as, to a limited extent, its legislative body. The actual legislative power to revise the European Patent Convention lies with the Contracting States themselves when meeting at a Conference of the Contracting States.
The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international patent law treaty, concluded in 1970. It provides a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions in each of its contracting states. A patent application filed under the PCT is called an international application, or PCT application.
A patent office is a governmental or intergovernmental organization which controls the issue of patents. In other words, "patent offices are government bodies that may grant a patent or reject the patent application based on whether the application fulfils the requirements for patentability."
The Trilateral Patent Offices, or simply the Trilateral Offices, are the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In 1983, these patent offices set up a programme of co-operation in an effort to "improve efficiency of the global patent system".
A utility model is a patent-like intellectual property right to protect inventions. This type of right is only available in some countries. Although a utility model is similar to a patent, it is generally cheaper to obtain and maintain, has a shorter term, shorter grant lag, and less stringent patentability requirements. In some countries, it is only available for inventions in certain fields of technology and/or only for products. Utility models can be described as second-class patents.
epoline is a set of web-based computer programs and services enabling applicants, patentees and their representatives to file patent applications online before the European Patent Office (EPO), as well as to monitor the status of patent applications during their prosecution and patents during an opposition. The epoline products and services have been implemented and are maintained by the EPO, according to the Decision of the President of the EPO dated 29 October 2002.
Japanese patent law is based on the first-to-file principle and is mainly given force by the Patent Act of Japan. Article 2 defines an invention as "the highly advanced creation of technical ideas utilizing the law of nature".
In Japanese patent law, F-term is a system for classifying Japanese patent documents according to the technical features of the inventions described in them. It is not a replacement for the International Patent Classification (IPC) or other patent classifications, but complements other systems by providing a means for searching documents from different viewpoints. A symbol attached to a patent document, indicating that the invention disclosed in the document has a particular technical feature, is also called an F-term.
The Japan Patent Office is a Japanese governmental agency in charge of industrial property right affairs, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The Japan Patent Office is located in Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda, Tokyo and is one of the world's largest patent offices. The Japan Patent Office's mission is to promote the growth of the Japanese economy and industry by administering the laws relating to patents, utility models, designs, and trademarks.
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a large proportion of the bibliographic records in bibliographic databases describe articles, conference papers, etc., rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.
Google Patents is a search engine from Google that indexes patents and patent applications.
The Nordic Patent Institute (NPI) is an intergovernmental organisation established by the governments of Denmark, Iceland and Norway. It is based in Taastrup, Denmark. Since January 1, 2008, the Institute acts as Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) authority. As of May 1, 2013, it is, with the European Patent Office and the Swedish Patent and Registration Office, one of the three International Searching Authorities (ISA) and International Preliminary Examining Authorities (IPEA) available for international applications filed with the Receiving Offices of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It also carries out Supplementary International Searches in Danish, English, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.
The Intellectual Property High Court, sometimes abbreviated IPHC, is a special branch of Tokyo High Court in the judicial system of Japan. It is based in Kasumigaseki, a district in Chiyoda Ward in Tokyo, Japan.
The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a set of initiatives for providing accelerated patent prosecution procedures by sharing information between some patent offices. It also permits each participating patent office to benefit from the work previously done by the other patent office, with the goal of reducing examination workload and improving patent quality.
The National Industrial Property Institute is the national intellectual property office of France, in charge of patents, trademarks and industrial design rights. Yves Lapierre is, since 2010, the directeur général of the INPI. Until becoming the head of the European Patent Office, Benoît Battistelli held that position.
A digital library, digital repository, or digital collection, is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, or other digital media formats. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection.
The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) is a statutory board under the Singapore Ministry of Law of the Singapore Government. IPOS advises on and administers intellectual property (IP) laws, promotes IP awareness and provides the infrastructure to facilitate the development of IP in Singapore.
VINITI is a subsidiary of the Russian Academy of Sciences devoted to gathering scientific and technical information from sources throughout the world and disseminating this information to Russian scientific community.
Japanese design law is determined by the Design Act. Under this Act, only registered designs are legally protected, and it stipulates the procedure for obtaining a design registration in the Japan Patent Office. The protection for unregistered design is provided by the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
The Global Dossier is an online public service launched in June 2014 by the five "IP5" offices, i.e. the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japan Patent Office (JPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), China's National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), to offer an integrated access to the respective "file wrappers", free of charge and with automatic machine translations to English. A file wrapper, also called "public file", contains documents, including the search reports, office actions and correspondence between the applicant and the patent office, relating to a particular patent application. The file wrapper therefore provides the file history of a patent application. The EPO, SIPO, JPO and KIPO file wrappers are already available, as of June 2015, and the USPTO file wrappers are scheduled to be available "by the second half of 2015".
